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“Responsibility can be the most exhilarating thing
in the world or it can keep you up at night. I find
both to be true, depending on the week.”
To stay afloat in lean times, entrepreneurs
must start with a good business plan,
Boggs says. “I sometimes look at the original
business plan I put together and see a
number of inadequacies. Thank God we
succeeded anyway.”
Boning up on the financial side of business
is equally critical for those entrepreneurs
with degrees in science. Knowing
that entrepreneurship might be in her
future, Marrone, who has a Ph.D. in entomology,
took in-house management
training and business courses offered
by employers earlier in her career.
Others have opted to hire people with
that expertise. Help is also available
through the U.S. Small Business Administration,
which administers the
Small Business Innovation Research
grant program that encourages small
businesses to explore their technological
potential.
For her part, Dukor worked for
roughly 10 years for a medical diagnostics
division of Amoco until she
could save enough to start BioTools.
She and Nafie then raised about
$200,000, partly through the sale of
Dukor’s home, giving them enough to
get started.
Looking back, however, Dukor
says she regrets that she didn’t raise
capital, something she didn’t understand
how to do at the time. “Raising
capital would have given us the funds
not only to make the first prototype
spectrometer, but also to educate
the market,” she says. “Money from an
angel investor would have given us a muchneeded
jump-start and would have put less
strain on family finances.”
When approaching investors, Contag
advises would-be women entrepreneurs
to “choose your venture investors based
on their track record with other female
founders and their treatment of founders
in general.”
In addition, it’s important to “build a personal
board of directors or board of advisers
to advise you over the life cycle of your
company,” Contag says. “Your company
will go through many stages. Plan how you
want your role to develop so that it fits you
V-LABS INC.
and sustains the success of the company.”
At least in the earliest stages of starting
a business, an entrepreneur’s job is to
remain optimistic in the face of the many
challenges that will arise, Marrone says.
“You have to be able to creatively knock
down barriers that get in your way. You
can’t just wilt or give up. That attitude is
really critical.”
When Marrone started AgraQuest,
she says, “I was ahead of the market; the
biopesticides products I
was developing were seen
as snake oils, and I had to
work to change the market
perception.” For example,
the company integrated
biopesticides into conventional
pest management
programs and went
to farms to show growers
that they could get good or
better results compared
with conventional programs, she says.
In another barrier-busting move, Marrone
says she helped start a biopesticide
industry alliance of small biopesticide firms
ONE-STOP SHOP
Vercellotti assaying
samples of
polysaccharides
at V-Labs, the
company she
and her husband
started to provide
consulting, custom
manufacturing, and
analytical services.
that joined with larger companies to support
the passage of the Pesticide Registration
Improvement Act. That piece of legislation
makes the Environmental Protection Agency’s
approval process more predictable, she
says, thereby making it easier for companies
to raise money through investors.
SUBTLE GENDER BIAS from customers,
investors, or potential collaborators is another
hindrance with which some women
entrepreneurs have had to contend.
“Sometimes I feel like people are
surprised when they meet me,” Gleason
says. “They have not necessarily
clued in to the fact that I am going to
be female, and they sometimes assume
that I am somebody’s secretary.
You realize that you are always still
overcoming other people’s perceptions
of you before they are going to
listen to what you have to say. But I
try not to dwell on that so that I don’t
end up with a chip on my shoulder.”
Instead, she adds, “I focus on communicating
my ideas to make sure
that they are taken seriously.”
That can be a challenge, she concedes,
as women are not well represented
in venture capital firms or
in the companies to which Gleason
pitches her technology. “Most of the
people judging you are not women,
something I am used to dealing with
in the environment we have at MIT.”
Marrone says she faces a similar
situation in the agrochemical business,
where relatively few women
hold management positions. The
dynamics of a meeting change dramatically
when there is more than
one woman in a room, however.
“Generally, in a group made up of no
more than one woman, the men will
defer to the most powerful man in
the room, and then you can’t get a lot
of things done,” she says. “But when
you have at least two or three women
in a group, you can actually get down
to work.” In response, Marrone says she
strives to build diversity into her management
team, which is made up of more
women than men.
WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG 53 NOVEMBER 3, 2008